A few weeks ago kuzmichov posted instructions to talk.maemo.org on how to change the background of your N9′s home screen.

Kuzmichov’s instructions change the backround of the component behind all the swipable home screens. Today we’ll be changing the backgrounds of the 3 individual screens.

For that, we need to edit a different .css file,
/usr/share/themes/base/meegotouch/meegotouchhome/style/meegotouchhome.css

We want to add a background-image tag into three CSS blocks: SwipeEventsStyle, SwipeLauncherStyle and SwipeSwithcerStyle.

Naturally, we’ll need three images as well, let’s name them like this:

background-image-launcher.png
background-image-events.png
background-image-switcher.png

Copy these images into /usr/share/themes/blanco/meegotouch/images/backgrounds/

The code in the CSS blocks of meegotouchhome.css will become like this:

SwipeEventsStyle {
… code …
background-image: background-image-events
}

SwipeSwitcherStyle {
… code …
background-image: background-image-switcher
}

In addition to that, comment out/remove the background-color tag from NotificationAreaStyle, so the notification area background will become transparent. The messages themselves will still have a semi-transparent background color (most likely there’s a tag for that too but don’t know where).

Reboot, and you should have three nice background images!

You can download the modified meegotouchhome.css from here.

For some reason, when swiping between the events feed and app grid, there’s a 1 pixel wide column
between the backgrounds. Most likely there’s not much that can be done for that, but it’s a minor glitch anyway : )

Here’s an example of my home screens:

Have fun!

Just about to send MyMoves 0.1.4 to Nokia Store.

I reimplemented the recognition algorithm, so now the app should be a lot better at recognizing your gestures.
In addition to that, there are now new gestures for swiping from one corner to another.
Here’s the latest list of gestures:

Aand a video clip:

Let’s hope the guys&girls at the Store are quick at reviewing : )

Just sent MyMoves 0.1.3 update to Nokia Store for approval.

Most significant changes:
- Possibility to disable a gesture, there’s a ‘no application’ option in the app list
- 12 two-finger and 12 three-finger gestures
- Fixed icon scaling in the app list (e.g. Galaxy On Fire’s icon was taking a bit too much space : )

As you can see, the amount of available gestures has doubled! : )
The fact that now you can also disable gestures should make it convenient
to find the gestures that suit best for your purposes. Here are the gestures:

The update should hopefully pop up into Nokia Store soon. If you’re not into waiting,
you can install MyMoves 0.1.3 from my repository (instructions below).

Manual installation:

1. Add the mymoves repository to your phone:
- Create a file called /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mymoves.list
- Into that file, enter this line (without the quotes): “deb http://koti.kapsi.fi/~sh8dfwk/mymoves binary/“

2. Make sure you’ve got a working internet connection on your phone
3. apt-get update
4. apt-get install mymoves

That’s all this time!

In case you use MyMoves, here’s a fun thing to play with: running Python & shell scripts with gestures

For this you will need to have the developer mode enabled. I’m also going to assume you’ve already got Python for Harmattan already installed.

Running shell scripts with MyMoves
Say, you’ve got a useful shell script at /home/user/MyDocs/myscript.sh. Let’s run that using MyMoves gestures:

1. Edit /home/user/.config/mymoves.conf
2. Replace the line of the gesture of your choice. I’m going to use the ‘swipe up with two fingers’ gesture for this example, which is the row beginning with d0 in mymoves.conf

Put this into that line:
d0###MyScript###/usr/bin/aegis-exec -s -u user -l ‘/usr/bin/meego-terminal -n -e sh /home/user/MyDocs/myscript.sh’

3. Make sure to edit myscript.sh and insert a pausing row to the end of the script, so the Terminal window won’t just close immediately:

read -p ‘Press a key to continue…’

4. Go to MyMoves configuration UI, press ‘Stop Observing’ and after that ‘Start observing’, so the updated mymoves.conf is loaded.
5. Swipe!

Running Python scripts with MyMoves
Python scripts work exactly the same way, except you pass the -i parameter to the Python shell so it won’t close the Terminal window after the script is run.

So, for e.g. a script in /home/user/MyDocs/myscript.py, do the mymoves.conf editing as above, but add a line like this:

d0###MyPythonScript###/usr/bin/aegis-exec -s -u user -l ‘/usr/bin/meego-terminal -e /usr/bin/python -i /home/user/MyDocs/myscript.py’

Then just press ‘Stop Observing’ and ‘Start Observing’ in the MyMoves UI, and you’re ready to use the script.

Here’s a short overview of the latest version:

Sources in:
http://github.com/sandst1/mymoves
http://github.com/sandst1/mymoveserver

If you want to install the application the dev-mode way, see the instructions in
http://sandst1.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/mymoves-0-1-2-ready-for-store-submission/

Aand here’s a textual overview:
http://sandst1.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/overview-of-mymoves/

MyMoves is an application which adds a functionality of opening applications using multitouch gestures.
It currently works in Nokia Harmattan phones (N9/N950). There are 32 gestures to choose from, 16 of which
are two-finger and 16 three-finger gestures. Here they are:

Using MyMoves is simple. For each available gesture, you select an application you want to launch,
and then using that gesture anywhere in the system will open up the application you selected. MyMoves
also recognizes if you do a pinch gesture, and stays out of the way of normal phone usage.

Here are the most important screens of the application:

The main menu has four buttons and an indication text which tells whether or not MyMoves is observing your gestures. Pressing ‘My Moves’ takes you to the gesture configuration list (the middle picture). There you see which app is connected to which gesture. If you want to change an app, just click on a gesture item and the application selection list opens.

Using the gestures in practice

When you have configured the gestures you want to use, make sure the main page is saying ‘Observing gestures’. After this, you can close the configuration UI.

Now the gestures are ready for use. MyMoves comes with a gesture recognition server which handles launching the applications. It is started immediately after installing the application, and after boot-up (please note, it might take > 1min for the server to start after boot, because the system launches the more high-priority items first).

Launching an application with a gesture:
- For two-finger gestures: hold your fingers together like a pencil, and make a gesture
- For three-finger gestures: hold your fingers just like with two-finger gestures, but add a third finger on top and make a gesture

That’s all. Have fun using the application!
You can download MyMoves for free from the Nokia Store.

Here’s a short overview video:

Another clip, of the 0.1.4 version:

If you want to support my work, you can

Changes in 0.1.2:
– Added a howto-screen
– Moved mymoves.conf to ~/.config
– About screen
– Splash screen
– Logo to main page
– Icons in app selection list
– Overall tweaking of the UI

Installation:

1. Add the mymoves repository to your phone:
- Create a file called /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mymoves.list
- Into that file, enter this line (without the quotes): “deb http://koti.kapsi.fi/~sh8dfwk/mymoves binary/“

2. Make sure you’ve got a working internet connection on your phone
3. apt-get update
4. apt-get install mymoves

If you’ve already got MyMoves 0.0.2 installed, just run
apt-get update && apt-get install mymoves
(yes, that’s apt-get install), and it will update the package.

Screenshots:

Changes in the latest version:

- Fixed pinch recognition. Two-finger gestures shouldn’t interfere
with two-finger phone usage anymore, e.g. zooming a web page and
panning after that with two fingers is now possible
- UI tweaks: A cancel button to app selection list
- Observing isn’t stopped anymore if the UI is closed in MyMoves view
- New icon (wheeee)

Installation:

1. Add the mymoves repository to your phone:
- Create a file called /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mymoves.list
- Into that file, enter this line (without the quotes): “deb http://koti.kapsi.fi/~sh8dfwk/mymoves binary/“

2. Make sure you’ve got a working internet connection on your phone
3. apt-get update
4. apt-get install mymoves

If you’ve already got MyMoves 0.0.2 installed, just run
apt-get update && apt-get install mymoves
(yes, that’s apt-get install), and it will update the package.

Have fun!

MyMoves version 0.0.2 is now out. The previous version was a hackish demo which didn’t contain a proper UI
for normal usage. This version does : ) Also, recording the gestures with a clumsy UI wasn’t the nicest
thing on earth, so I settled for having 12 pre-defined gestures, which should all be simple enough to
be recognized with different users.

In order to avoid disturbing normal usage of the phone, there are 6 two-finger and 6 three-finger
gestures, and no single-finger gestures at all. In addition to that, there’s pinch recognition for
avoiding accidentally opening an application while zooming in or out. Currently it handles most of the pinches, but there’s still a couple of glitches to fix, such as it doesn’t yet catch zooming of web pages 100% of the times.

Here are the gestures:

Most significant changes:
- Simple configuration UI for selecting an app for each gesture
- Option in the UI to start/stop observing gestures
- 12 preconfigured multi-touch gestures
- Pinch recognition to avoid conflicting with normal usage
- Auto-start of the recognition server on boot and after installation

Installation is now available via a repository, so enough for copying stuff into the phone manually : )

Instructions for installation (run as root):
1. In case you have the previous version of mymoves installed, remove it from the command line:
- dpkg -P mymoves mymoveserver

2. Add the mymoves repository to your phone:
- Create a file called /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mymoves.list
- Into that file, enter this line (without the quotes): “deb http://koti.kapsi.fi/~sh8dfwk/mymoves binary/“

3. Make sure you’ve got a working internet connection on your phone

4. apt-get update
5. apt-get install mymoves
6. Ready to run!

Have fun with the app! : )

For the interested, sources are in GitHub:
The UI: http://github.com/sandst1/mymoves
Server side: http://github.com/sandst1/mymoveserver

Here’s a demo clip of MyMoves 0.0.2 in action:

EDIT: Thanks to a question in Youtube, decided to make another small demo to show that you can also use the gestures in the lock screen. The system forces the lock screen on top, but it still opens an application ready for you to use : ) The clip:

Read a great set of XInput2 blog posts by Peter Hutterer and fiddled around with the code examples,
and the end-result is nice: System-wide multi-touch events!

So. Next up in the MyMoves roadmap will be refactoring it for multi-touch support.

N950 is getting 6 simultaneous touches, will that be enough for gestures?: P